The rest of that day passed in utter stultifying boredom. After his workout in the ring, Grant spent some time in the trainer’s room getting treatment, which mostly meant a rubdown and some ice. Blake—or Brian, I wasn’t sure how to think of him now—got his usual mummy-in-ice treatment.
If that guy needed that much work just to do the walkthrough I’d seen I couldn’t imagine how he was still really performing. But a breaking body could go a long way if the mind was determined enough. I decided not to interrupt that with any talking, but I did make a note of the trainer. He reminded me of every trainer and PT I’d seen in my high school and college days. Maybe a little older. In excellent shape, wearing a polo-shirt tucked into khakis, a belt holding various kinds of medical equipment around his trim waist.
Name tag said Malik. I knew better than to interrupt him while he worked, so I just made a note to try and catch him later.
I walked Grant back to the hotel and we sat around the room for a while, him flipping channels, me reading.
“What do you need to do in the morning?” I asked.
“Sleep, eat, rest for the show.”
“You don’t plan to work out in the morning?”
“I might like to get up a sweat before the ring. Blake’s not a fan of oiling up, but the crowd usually likes the look, so sweat it is.”
“I’m sorry, oiling up?”
“Yeah, you know. Put on baby oil. Makes the muscles look good under the lights.”
“Right. Well, I need to get in a work out at some point. This hotel’s got a gym, right?”
“Sure does.”
“Want to go see what it’s got?”
“Not really.”
I sighed. “Look, if I leave you alone in here, do you promise…promise…not to go anywhere, not to pick up the room phone, and to call my cell if there’s so much as a knock at the damn door?”
“Didn’t you say you weren’t supposed to get separated from me?”
“Not in public where anyone can see. Here in the hotel, I know exactly where you are. It’s got pretty limited access in and out, so anyone intending to do you harm probably has to make themselves known to a camera or an employee at some point. In fact, I should probably do a walk around and find out how limited the access is.”
“Probably?” For once, Grant stopped looking at the television and turned to me. “You don’t sound real sure.”
“I told you, I’m a detective, not a bodyguard. I have some ideas about what I’m supposed to do, but my best bet is to find the source of the threats as quickly as possible so you can go back to resting easy.”
From what I had seen so far, Grant really didn’t have any problem with resting easy even now. But there was no angle in saying that.
“Then I’m going to take a walk around the hotel and check out the fitness center. You stay put. You don’t leave for any reason without calling me to come get you.” I went to my gym bag and pulled out one of the small canisters of pepper spray Jason had given me. I tossed it to him.
He caught it, startled. “What’s this?”
“Somebody kicks down the door, you point this at them—make sure the nozzle is pointing away from you—you press down on the trigger, and ruin their day.”
“Pepper spray?” He immediately turned the business end towards his own eyes and held it up close to read it. “Oh man. Cool. Can I keep this?”
“No. If you don’t have to use it, I want it back. And it’s not a toy! You can blind yourself with that stuff if you’re not careful.”
“Fine, fine.” He set it down on the nightstand and sat back heavily on the bed. I could tell from the way he kept looking at it that he was probably going to pick it back up as soon as I left the room.
“Don’t make me regret handing that to you,” I said as I shut the door behind me.
* * *
There is no architecture in the world more boring than that of the national chain motel. Just endless empty corridors with the same carpet, the same doors, the same paintings hanging at the junctions and elevators.
Where did they get those paintings? Who was the artist or studio supplying the Holiday and Red Roof Inns of the world with their art?
“The Bland School,” I murmured. “The Visual Oatmeal Movement. The Don’t Focus Too Muchers.” I was pretty sure I could have done better than those, but they were good first efforts.
It was a pretty standard hotel block, with cameras pointed at all the entrances, fire doors, and long hallways. There wasn’t anything I could do, individually, to beef up the security, except stay glued to Grant all the time.
He didn’t seem too worried for a guy who was spending a lot of company money on a supposed threat to his life. And nobody seemed at all interested in the idea that any threats might be coming from within the company.
Eventually I found my way to the fitness room. I had been hoping for a gym with at least one rack.
I couldn’t be that lucky.
Against a mirrored wall was a short row of treadmills. In a far corner, a rack held a selection of kettlebells next to a row of dumbbells, rising from fifteen pounds to fifty-five in each case. There were some rolled up mats in the back. In the closest corner there was a resistance band machine, the kind that I assumed was there to make people feel like they’d gotten a workout without having to deal with something like real weights.
“Gonna be tough to get a workout,” I muttered.
“You wanna go in there, I’ll show you how to use some of the equipment. After you give me that piece on your shoulder.”
Down at the end of the corridor stood Shawn, the security guy, wearing three different layers of Under Armour and a towel over his shoulder.
I did not have time for this. I did not have any real desire for this.
But I figured I might as well get it over with all the same. I ducked into the room and shut the door behind me and pressed my back against the wall.
Sean came boiling through the door. I didn’t wait and I wasn’t in the mood to be fair. I kicked him in the back of the knee. Hard.
To his credit, he stumbled forward but didn’t go down, and he turned quickly and immediately charged.
When his shoulder hit me and pushed me back up against the wall hard enough to blow out some of my breath, I began to wonder if I had miscalculated.
I was able to brace enough to not be completely breathless, and I started bringing my elbows down on his back as hard as I could. On the third blow I actually caught the point of my elbow on the back of his head, which hurt me as much as him, but he backed away, dazed.
I didn’t feel any too good about it either and we stood facing each other for a moment.
“I don’t fuckin’ work for you,” I spat. “And I don’t need to take your orders.”
He shook away whatever was clouding his eyes and lifted his hands, falling into a boxing stance. At least, boxing was how my brain categorized it; I didn’t much know or care what kind of martial arts this guy might know. I did know that with my back against the wall, I was capable only of reacting, not acting. And that had to change.
I let my wrestling training take over. I got low, lunged forward, shooting for his legs. I’m sure a coach would’ve yelled at me about my form, but I got him to the ground regardless.
I was not aiming for the safe return mandated by the rules I’d wrestled under in college. He landed hard.
Not hard enough; unfortunately I didn’t control him once we hit the ground. At least there I had as much chance to deliver blows as he did, and certainly I took some. I barely had time to register one good shot to his chin—most of which was deflected as he ducked into his shoulder—before he rolled me off and came back to his feet.
I scrambled to my feet and shot for his legs again, low and fast and hard. Down he went. I got my knee up into his chest and my arm over his throat, my other hand pinning his shoulder down. None of this would’ve been legal if there was a mat and a ref. But there wasn’t.
This seemed to count a lot more.
“You can give up or you can go to sleep,” I said, through gritted teeth. He tried to buck me off of him, and his knee bounced off my tailbone a couple of times, once on to my lower back. Thankfully he’d lost the combat boots and replaced them with sneakers. It hurt, but he was losing breath. About now the world was starting to go dark on him.
“Enough,” he rasped, barely able to get the words out. “Enough.”
I took my arm away from his throat and popped to my feet. I extended a hand to help him up. He didn’t seem eager to take it.
“Come on,” I said, “Get up, straighten yourself out, inflate your lungs.” I pulled him back to his feet and he staggered over to the one of the pieces of resistance-wire bullshit this gym was festooned with.
I could feel my adrenaline draining. I did not have anything resembling real fight stamina left. He backed away and stumbled into the seat of the resistance machine.
“Why,” I said, “are you so determined to get my gun?”
He looked at me with disgust in his features. “Mr. Gogarty told me to, uh, figure you out when the tour got started. He said to start by taking your gun.”
“What the fuck,” I said, startled.
“Look, all I know is what I was told to do. I tried. You win. You fucking cheated, but you won.”
“How’d I cheat?”
“Kicking me in the back of the knee instead of taking me head-on? Fuckin’ pussy. My bad knee too. Bastard’s gonna swell up like a grapefruit.”
I rolled my eyes and decided I would ignore his stupidity to get at the bigger revelation.
“Why would your boss agree to hire me, and agree that I should go armed, and then tell his head of security to disarm me, violently, if necessary?”
“Beats the shit out of me. I don’t know how that old man thinks.”
“You going to let it go now?”
“Hey, man, I followed his order. I tried you out. You’re for real.”
“Christ,” I muttered, wiping sweat out of my forehead. “This is so goddamn stupid. You could’ve just come to talk to me, you know. Professional to professional. Let me know that your boss had second thoughts or wanted to check my damn references.”
“Would’ve defeated the point.”
“What was the point? Now if some shit does go down, both of us are less effective.”
He frowned, and stood up. “I better go see Malik, get some ice. You need treatment?”
“I think it’s gonna look really fucking stupid if we both show up to see the trainer saying we got hurt separately when we’ve clearly been in a fight.”
“Eh, it happens,” Sean said. “People get in fights on the road all the time. He’ll stay quiet.”
I waved him off. “You go. I’ll ice myself up.”
Gingerly, he extended his hand. “No hard feelings?”
I stared at his hand. A part of me, a competitive part, wanted to take his hand by the wrist and finish what I’d started. But that was adrenaline and anger talking. I took his hand, gently, and shook. “No hard feelings. From now on, maybe just talk to me.”